IN DECEMBER, the Federal Trade Commission charged that ads for the program Hooked on Phonics were misleading. FTC spokeswoman Bonnie Jansen later described the action against Gateway Education Products of Orange County, which markets Hooked on Phonics, as a routine "bread-and-butter advertising case." She wishes.

This month, the FTC announced an agreement in which Gateway admitted no wrong-doing but agreed to follow specified advertising guidelines. The story, however, is that the folks at the FTC are smarting from what turned into a bitter, if unintentional, skirmish in America's education war.

After the December announcement, the FTC received 2,500 letters -- as well as phone calls and e-mail messages -- from parents outraged at the action. Jansen said Friday, "Many people who called were concerned that the FTC was banning, or at the very least restricting, sales of phonics programs." Not true, she said. The FTC concerned itself strictly with advertising. Under the agreement, Gateway must not -- without "competent and reliable evidence" -- advertise that its product can help students learn to read "quickly and easily" or can enable those with learning disabilities to read.

Nonetheless, you can see why parents were suspicious of any action against a curriculum that they feel has helped their children in the very area where another government institution -- public schools -- have failed. A Colorado mother wrote, "I'll tell you, it angers me no end that my children need me to teach them how to read. I thought the schools were supposed to be teaching our children to read." Of course, she was angry. The FTC was targeting what worked for her, not what failed her.

Of course, the FTC's bailiwick is advertising. It is not the FTC's job to jump in if the public schools don't live up to their promises, because schools don't advertise and parents don't pay directly for schools. Too bad, because if the public schools had to verify what the FTC is making Hooked on Phonics prove, more children could read.

This column in no way endorses Hooked on Phonics. I've never tried it. I only wish that -- just as Gateway has to show evidence that its stuff works -- public school professionals who subscribe to whole language and new-new math (the anti-basics, kids'll-pick-it-up approach to education) had to provide proof of success before they imposed their schemes on America's children.

As Novato mother Leslie Schwarze put it Friday, her daughter Lauren had been taught the "guess at the word, do everything but sound it out" approach to reading. Lauren wasn't learning to read in school, but did begin to learn after she got Hooked on Phonics.

Also, while the FTC warned Gateway not to advertise without proof that its products help the learning disabled, parents complained that school officials told them their children were learning disabled when they weren't -- and those children learned to read with Hooked on Phonics.

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Back in December the FTC complained that Gateway misled consumers to believe they could teach themselves to read "in a home setting without a teacher or tutor." If only the FTC had to look at what teachers and tutors do in a school setting. The 1994 National Assessment of Education Progress tests found that 42 percent of the nation's fourth-graders are at "below basic" reading skills. Only one in four were "at or above proficient."

Too bad it's not the FTC's job to watchdog public schools. Then it could warn educrats they cannot claim that "children will learn in a school setting with a teacher or tutor." If public schools had to withstand the same scrutiny as Hooked on Phonics, there might be no Hooked on Phonics, because the schools would teach basics.

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